A technology which uses amounts of characteristic based on histograms (frequency value distributions) of data (image, audio, etc.) of process targets as elements is utilized for class discrimination, detection of specific parts or the like of the data of the process targets.
Recently, random access to a memory has been used for a vote process to each bin (category) for calculating a histogram. With such a vote process, it has been difficult to achieve rapid calculation because the vote process cannot be performed in parallel. A technology which divides a memory into a plurality of banks and performs a mapping between the bins of a histogram and memory addresses has been developed. With this technology, parallel calculation units respectively access separate banks to enable histograms to be determined by a parallel process. However, in the above-described technology, since a mapping between the bins of the histogram and a memory space is fixed, the efficiencies of the memory space and the parallelization decrease and a process speed decreases.
One of the subjects to be solved by the present invention is to calculate amounts of characteristic efficiently using parallelization of memories.